


Draco Malfoy and the Unexpected Painting

by OlderShouldKnowBetter



Series: Pride & Scorpius-verse [3]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Community: HPFT, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-20
Updated: 2016-10-20
Packaged: 2018-08-23 16:29:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8334472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OlderShouldKnowBetter/pseuds/OlderShouldKnowBetter
Summary: Adrift in the Tate.
Walking through the Tate Gallery, Draco comes across three paintings that cause him to re-evaluate himself and his beliefs.





	

**Draco Malfoy and the Unexpected Painting**

 

In the muted early morning light the building was almost invisible against the washed out grey of the London sky. The imposing façade of white marble reminded him somewhat of his home, but that was faint comfort because what was inside the building …

… What was inside staggered him, had left him bereft of his sense of self. Humbled him like nothing in his heretofore privileged life had ever been truly able to do.

He’d been undergoing such radical changes to his life over the past year. Serving time in the community service that he had been forced into as a punishment for what his part had been in the wizarding war. Locked away from his life in lowly, degrading servitude. Forced to work with the menials of the hospital, live with them too. Only having a half a day off a week to do what he wanted and even then he did was to visit his mother; who also had her own community service to live out. A part of him knew it had been very light punishment compared to what could have been – what had been received by others in the same situation as he. Actually, most of him knew it, though he hadn’t been nearly so sanguine and accepting about it the year before when he’d began his term at St Mungos, but now that it was over he knew he had gotten off lightly.

So recently completed that he still couldn’t believe the freedoms that were now his to enjoy. Freedom. He mentally scoffed at the word and paused in his forward motion as it began to unleash a flood of emotion. 

He couldn’t believe that it had only been three days ago that he’d first come to this Gallery. 

Three days ago.

The first day he had left the place staggering under the crushing realisations he’d come to.

He’d Gryffindored up though and come back for a second day, but it had left him with more questions than answers. So he’d gone to research them and what he’d found … well, what he’d found then had left him unable to face the world at all. He’d barely gotten out of the bed the next day and when he did it was only with a sheet wrapped around him to either answer a call of nature or make himself a pot noodle in the cramped one-bedroomed flat that he was forced to live in till he was allowed home.

So this was the fourth day and his third visit. He wouldn’t have come back except that painting drew him back; he had to see it at least once more.

He must have come to a halt at a critical point because someone said, from behind him, “Oi mate, what’cha doin’? You’re blockin’ the door.”

Draco muttered out an apology and pushed at the Muggle contrivance that allowed him access to the Gallery. It was a fascinating device, he had to admit; it was a doorway, but it revolved. Such that, and this was obviously its purpose, the oppressive miasma of the London outside never touched the rarefied atmosphere contained within the building.

He moved to one side to allow the Muggles to file in behind him. The distraction of the door had put abeyance to his emotions for a time, but they were threatening to overwhelm him again.

Freedom.

Yes he was free now: free to come and go; free to fill his days as he pleased: free; physically at least.

But mentally, emotionally … the time spent at St Mungos had cracked his surety of the way the world was and it had smashed so completely that any hope of a return to his previously and dearly held notions were now irrevocably gone. For all his physical freedom he felt himself mentally shackled with manacles so heavy that they threatened to pull him down into the sea of humanity which surrounded him. And a sea it was, he’d come to feel the reality of that analogy a few days ago.

Since the certainties of his youth had been shattered and forged anew in that crucible that was being a menial of St Mungos, he’d been out and about in Muggle London. He had to know, to see for himself all the ‘wondrous works’ that Muggles had wrought.

He was like a child, no, worse than a child. At least a child learnt and discovered things that matched the pace of its own development. He instead, was thrust out into this world, knowing less about it than a toddler taking his first tentative steps.

He ventured out into Greater London, away from the haunts of wizards and witches. He needed to see it first hand, to discover what the Muggles had made and done; visiting Museums and Galleries. In doing so, he had to walk the streets of the great metropolis. He couldn’t just apparate to the institutions he sought, no, he needed to have visited the places he wanted to apparate to. And his parents, naturally enough given their own prejudices, had never taken him to any place that gloried in muggle industry or artistic endeavour.

In walking the streets of London he had been swamped by, swarmed by Muggles.

Muggles.

He would have once said the word as he would have said the word: ants. Like ants they could work together, he had known, they could build things, but in the end an anthill was just an ant hill, the works of Muggles were the works of Muggles and not too dissimilar in his reckoning. That’s exactly the way he used to think and in his journey through the streets of London, as the Muggles surrounded him, he would have thought that they were swarming him, dragging him under. But that’s when the metaphor of the sea came to him. He realised now that he wasn’t apart, separate, above humanity. No, he was like a molecule of water, cast adrift in this ocean of humanity that surged in a great tide across this island of Britain. Cast adrift into this sea he was; alone and threatened with subsumption into it.

So he was making this, almost pilgrimage, to these places that showcased the achievements of Muggles. In part it was to acquaint himself with their accomplishments, but it was also driven by his own ego’s desire to know that the achievements of wizards were no less mighty and awesome in their own right than those of ‘mere’ Muggles. 

And so he went to those temples of Muggle achievements: the British Museum, the Science Museum, the National Gallery, and the Natural History Museum. He even, much to his gratification, found what he knew unequivocally to be the work of wizards, scattered throughout what the Muggles believed to be their history alone. And the paintings and art in the galleries he’d been to had mostly left him cold too … until he came here.

“Are you alright sir?”

Someone was trying to catch his attention. Draco looked up from his half-crouch against the wall. His eyes focused from the contemplation of past events to the here and now, to see a Muggle security guard regarding him with understandable concern.

“I said sir, are you OK?” the guard repeated and Draco could see suspicion beginning to chase away the concern of the woman’s expression. Draco straightened himself up, coming almost to attention with a swift tug to the bottom of his muggle jacket. He regained his usual air of superiority and could see it begin to allay the suspicion of the guard.

“Yes I am. I thank you for your concern. The change in atmosphere, when I entered, must have set off my asthma.”

The guard was completely taken in by this as he knew it would. Her dark complexion couldn’t hide her worry as she reached out a caring hand to him. The orderlies of St Mungos had put him on to the ruse, which they said had almost a magical effect upon Muggles.

Because it was not like he could use actual magic. He knew the lobby was covered by security cameras as was nearly everywhere in London. And that’s not to include mobile phones – something Draco hadn’t even known existed till this last year. A telephone, without a cord, that you could carry around? Added to that – and this was the extraordinary thing – most of them had cameras! The vestibule was teeming with Muggles and almost all of them had their mobile phones out, or actual cameras, taking photos of everything and everyone. A wizard had to be very careful not to do anything terribly obvious lest he become the subject of the attentions of the M.L.E. office.

With an imperious nod, acknowledging her kindness, he strode past the guard and out into the main building. Beyond the vestibule was the foyer, made to seem open and airy because it was under the main dome. His steps faltered half way through the open room. There was a doorway to his right and to his left and one directly across from the doorway through which he’d entered. He started forward again, walking directly across the room: it was the quickest path to the painting that he came back to see. He could have as easily gone to either the left or right doorways and eventually gotten to where he wanted, however. There was not a single internal wall in the place that didn’t have a doorway in it connecting up the galleries – so that you could get to which ever gallery you wanted by any number of routes.

He moved on, slower now, back to contemplating his reasons for his return. Perhaps he should go back to the other Galleries, even the Museums, they had initially left him unimpressed, but perhaps the insights that this place had afforded him might engender a greater appreciation of what he had dismissed earlier?

This place had piqued his interest, more so than the others, because of the fact that they were British – the majority of the artists whose work graced this collection. The Tate’s remit was to cover British and modern art. So some of the modern stuff was done by foreigners, but mostly the paintings were all by British artists.

He was British and for some reason it resonated with him. On his first visit he had picked up a pamphlet with a brief introduction to the place and he’d thought, _“So these are some of the greatest works by the Muggles of Britain? Well, let’s see your best then.”_ It was almost a challenge, the way he’d thought, a challenge to impress him.

But even with that, with him actively trying to find the best in them, he hadn’t really. He’d passed painting after painting, hung so closely together, even over each other in places in an effort to fit them all in. If they sought to impress him with their sheer number it didn’t – the walls of his own Manor and, in places, the walls of Hogwarts were similarly festooned with paintings. So that didn’t serve to move him.

And the subjects were similar in scope and range to what he’d seen before: family portraits; landscapes; families in landscapes; people doing everyday things; artisans at work; battles; women; men; children. Everything he’d seen in wizard paintings with the difference being that none of the Muggle works had the magics that brought the figures within them to life. All and all, a big disappointment.

Until.

Until he came to that painting. It was of a girl who’d thrown herself into a river with the purpose of drowning. She wasn’t real, she never existed. She was some character from some famous play by some famous English playwright. Draco always forgot the names involved, even though he read them again each time he saw the painting. And the name of the playwright sounded so much like a wizarding name that Draco wouldn’t have been surprised if he was to eventually find out he was.

It was the first time that he’d actually seen a painting of someone dead. In wizard paintings, they painted dead people, Draco supposed, but they painted them alive of course – otherwise it would defeat the whole purpose of a painting that could move and talk to you, if the person in it was just lying there dead. But the Muggle painter had brought this imaginary, dead girl to life in such a real way that Draco wanted to walk down that painted bank and wade into the river and lift the poor girl’s body out. Or possibly save her, the way the painter had portrayed her, she just might not be dead; Draco couldn’t tell.

It was like a body blow to Draco – the skill that the Muggle artist had employed to realise this scene. Not one iota of magic had helped him; not one daub of colour moved upon the canvas. Yet it was as alive as any wizard painting that he’d ever seen.

He’d staggered away from the painting beginning to reassess all he’d seen. He looked back along the way he’d come at the scores of paintings that he’d walked by, but he eschewed going back and continued on into the next gallery. He now couldn’t help but look at all the paintings with a different eye. Some of them weren’t that good – just a meadow or a person he’d never heard of – but some lived and breathed just like the dead girl (metaphorically speaking of course).

Maybe wizard paintings required skill too? Draco wasn’t that quick to dismiss his own kind, but surely the magic behind their power to move, might make up for a lot? Wondering this he happened to walk into a gallery that contained some of the more modern paintings.

That was where he was going now, not strictly copying his movements from his first visit. He was going past the room that held all those odd stone and bronze ‘statues’. You had to call them such, Draco supposed, because they couldn’t be anything else. But to him, they looked like blobs of stone, or bronze, which only vaguely resembled the labels upon them: ‘Woman’; ‘Reclining Figure’; ‘Two Piece Reclining Figure No. 2’. All of them by some mad Muggle named Henry Moore, who Draco thought obviously didn’t know what a woman actually looked like.

Draco moved past them, heading on to the gallery that contained the first of the paintings that he’d come back to see. The same one that had halted his progress so dramatically the first time he’d seen it. After seeing that drowned girl – what was her name again … O-something? – he had been viewing everything with a much more open mind; till he came here.

He would never forget the name of the painting, nor the name of the artist, and especially not the subject. The artist’s name was easy: Bacon. Just like his favourite breakfast. The name of the painting, actually it comprised of three canvases, was ‘Triptych’. It was a stupid name. It was like calling a single painting: ‘Painting’. But that was OK as it matched what was depicted; a stupid name for a stupid painting. Draco had never seen its like before. It was awful. The figures, he supposed that they were meant to be humans as they were vaguely humanlike, but they were distorted, especially around their faces. They were the wrong colour too – grey and white and a garish pink. The backgrounds were not fit of the name, just blocks of colour: grey for the floor, beige for the walls and black rectangles meant to be doorways. It also wasn’t just that the figures were misshapen, they were also wrong looking, like they’d melted or pooled in places and missing large portions of their anatomy.

Simply awful.

But when he stood in front of it again, like he did the first time he saw it - that first day that he’d visited the Tate - even now he couldn’t take his gaze away from it. The first time he stood in front of it, he must have been there, staring at it, for at least half an hour. He wasn’t planning to spend that long with it today, but he still had to look at it – he couldn’t just pass it by.

There was something powerful about it, something that belied its first impression.

This wasn’t the work of an ant.

He’d read about this Muggle in another brochure picked up from the front desk. He was a drinker and a gambler. A smoker and unapologetically gay. These three canvases weren’t his only works, there were plenty of more grotesque portraits by him, a few on the walls of this building and many others all around the world, apparently. And a lot of them worth a staggering amount of Muggle money.

The painting of the drowned girl had made him realise that there were Muggles of talent and ability out there. But this painting showed him that there were Muggles who had their own voices and knew that what they had to say had value. Hadn’t Muggles, after all, made this building and most of those in this great city? Made the cars on the road outside and those accursed mobile phones and security cameras? So there had to be Muggles of talent and ability and worth, and all being so without sparing a single thought to one Draco Malfoy and what he might think of them.

Sure there were some Muggles who weren’t clever and talented, but there were wizards like that too. He flashed back to those two ‘friends’ of his from school. Though they’d been more like sycophants than true friends as such. They had both been plenty untalented and stupid. Thinking of them, brought back memories of the last moments of Vincent Crabbe. Stupid in life and stupid in death. He’d proven to be a bit more talented than Draco had realised, but his stupidity in releasing Fiendfyre in a sealed room that he was in, was unparalleled. It was also fatal. Draco had been too caught up in everything else that had been going on that day to fully process it, but it had affected him afterwards. The death, the horrible death, of this boy – whom he had known for so many years – was awful. Dragged under the flames of his own devising the image of it still haunted Draco. He couldn’t look at naked flames anymore without being drawn back to that hour.

Draco shook off the memories of his dead friend and went back to his previous train of thought. He now had to accept that there were Muggles of talent, Muggles of value in the world. It wasn’t easy having your world shift from underneath you; having to accept a totally opposing paradigm than the one you’d previously lived your whole life by. He wasn’t so calm that first day as he was now. He’d completed the tour of the building, yes, but he hadn’t really registered all the rest of the paintings that he must have seen before he sought egress from the building and a rush to find some solitary place where he could apparate away.

He must have seen the painting that he was now going back to see, it was on the wall at the time. But it wasn’t until his second foray into the Tate that he had properly seen it. He’d come back that second time, determined to exercise his newfound perceptions. It had shaken him that he’d been impressed, not by all that he’d seen, but by a lot. It was funny how art had led him into this realisation, and not the science or the history or the technology of Muggles that he’d seen elsewhere. Perhaps it was because he was used to that stuff; magic had all of that. A lot of the technology of the Muggles could be replicated by the spells and potions that he’d made and mastered. As much of Muggle history as there was, there was an equal amount of wizard history parallel to it or winding in and out of shared past events. But the way that wizards employed art was completely different to that of the Muggles. Wizards had a use, and employment for art: the subjects of the paintings moved and talked and became a far more living connection with the past. For Muggles though it was far more about art for art’s sake: for the beauty and the meaning and the emotions it portrayed.

Perhaps it was that or perhaps it was also that art was the silent teacher. Art didn’t teach you as such, instead you learnt from it. It wasn’t active, it was passive. You brought your own experiences of life and the world to it and used what the art revealed to you in juxtaposition. Your perception about what an individual work meant or represented to you, explained far more about yourself than it did about the artist who made it in the first place. And that brought him to where he was today.

He walked across the room to the painting and to the seat that was conveniently placed in front of it. A convenience of Draco’s own devising. He’d wanted to stay a while and look at the painting properly that second time he’d seen it, but he was tired after having walked through most of the galleries. There was only one camera and one half-asleep security guard who split his attention between this and the next gallery. Once the guard had shuffled on his ‘rounds’ into the other room and there were no other Muggles about, Draco had obscured the camera and conjured a seat that matched the other two in the room.

He sat down to look at the painting that had done more than anything else to draw him back to the Gallery.

It was the painting of an alien.

And it was painted by an alien.

The subject could have been from Venus or another galaxy for all the points of similarity that it had with Draco. Same for the author of the work, he could have been a Martian for what his life experiences meant to Draco.

The subject was a skinhead, something drawn from the artist’s own youth. In the dirt-poor background of his childhood, that’s what he and all his mates were – short hair was just so much cheaper and easier. They wore long pants, white shirts, suspenders and a ubiquitous brand of shoe, the Doc Martin. Because that’s what they did, that’s what they wore. All the young boys of his acquaintance dressed like that, it was only later that the whole garb was appropriated by the fascists and the neo-nazis; according to the artist’s note that accompanied the painting.

Draco had no idea what any of this was or meant. 

He had to leave the Gallery to find out. The afternoon of that day was spent in a library researching it all. He’d had no idea where to start in a Muggle library, how all the books were arranged, so he did what he always did and asked the librarians. At Hogwarts he was by far the most studious of his friends, none of them ever accompanied him on his forays to the library, so they never saw how he behaved there. He knew that a lot of the other students of Hogwarts didn’t rate Madam Pince very highly, but he’d always gotten on well with her. A bit of charm and making sure all his books were returned on time, ensured that she always helped him find the books he wanted and that he was always first on the reserve list.

“Good afternoon,” he’d said to this new librarian, cast very much in the mold that he was used to, “I was wondering if you could help me?” After a smile and a polite nod from her he continued. “I am trying to find out what a skinhead is and more importantly how their nature has changed over time.”

Her furrowed eyebrows indicated that she thought the request strange for some reason, but she directed him to the encyclopaedias in the reference section.

“To whom do I have to apply for permission to access the books in the reference section?” 

As soon as he said it, from her bemused expression, he knew that he had fallen into some Muggle/Wizard miscommunication. It forced him to explain, “up until very recently, I've spent most of my life in a boarding school; an old fashioned boarding school. And whilst I spent a reasonable amount of time in the library,” he judged the woman’s character, he thought correctly, so with a charming wink he added, “as much as any young boy who's interested in his studies, but also equally interested in sports too, will do,” she grinned back at him, “all our books were specific textbooks, and we didn't have any fiction either. To even read a book in our reference section, what they called the restricted section, I had to have a signed note from a teacher.” He saw her shake her head at the foolishness of whatever school he’d attended and he knew he had her sympathy. “So that's why I’m so unfamiliar with your library, and I don’t know what skinheads either, for that matter.”

He explained about the painting he'd seen in the Tate Gallery, how he wanted to know what it meant, and with that, completely won the middle aged woman over. Of course she would help this nice and polite, gallery attending young man, with the obviously sheltered background. She spent twenty minutes with him: showing him the encyclopaedias, how to use the index, and she even hunted up a couple of journal articles that explained everything he wanted to know clearly and concisely. 

He dismissed her with a well judged, “Thank you so much. I must say that you've only confirmed my already high opinion of librarians, you've been such a help to me. Thank you again.” He thought he might have overdone it for a moment with the effusive flattery, but she patted him motherly on the shoulder and went away with a happy smile. Draco knew that if he ever returned, she would always be at his assistance. 

He settled down to read the articles, supplementing them with relevant entries from the encyclopaedias, and found out about the ‘reasonably' innocent origins of the subculture of skinheads and how it had been appropriated by the racists and the ultra-nationalists. Far more important than that, to his complete surprise he found out that a lot of Muggles hated each other; it wasn’t just the skinheads. No, black ones didn’t like yellow ones, brown ones didn’t like coffee ones and a fair amount of white ones hated every other colour. And there were groups, whole organisations and loose affiliations that hewed a particular line and preached hate against a certain skin colour or sexual orientation or even belief. 

It was like saying that red ants hated black ants … that made Draco pause in reflection for a moment, then he dived back into the encyclopedias using his new-found skills. He came back up with the answer and, yes funnily enough, in a lot of cases red ants didn’t get on well with black ones. So he supposed that there were still some similarities between ants and Muggles after all.

But Draco scoffed at the stupidity of Muggles, at least they had a choice, with ants it was purely instinctual. Muggles should know better than to hate someone because of the colour of their skin or something equally irrelevant. Didn’t they know that none of those things made one slight bit of difference to the abilities and character of the person. How you were born meant nothing about …

When he caught himself and realised what he’d actually been thinking, it caused another calamity in his heretofore strongly held beliefs. He’d had to adjust his thinking quite a bit over the course of the last year. At St Mungo’s he’d had to deal with every sort of witch and wizard, even squibs, and he’d had to put on his game face and pretend to like it. But he had pretended to himself that it was just him pretending to the world - that the old pureblood values still mattered to him. But maybe those old beliefs had been slipping quietly away, unnoticed. He’d genuinely believed what he’d just been thinking, so perhaps he was actually beginning to truly change his beliefs?

That had led him to his low state of yesterday, when he’d spent the day in underwear and despair. When he had calmed down and his state of mind had returned to a more even keel, he was reminded of a saying that he’d heard that could be adapted to this situation: ‘You show me why everyone else’s prejudices are illogical except for yours, and I’ll show you why yours are too.’

But all that research and that realisation had come much later, after he’d finished with the gallery for the day. And it wasn’t what had drawn him back to the painting today, well not the only thing; not the main reason.

The full title of the painting was, ‘A Skinhead getting caught with a bunch of flowers by his mates.’ To make sure of it, the artist had written it on the painting in large, ill-formed letters. Though, infuriatingly enough to Draco’s sensibilities, what was actually written was, “Skinhead caught with bunch of flowers by his mates.’ It so pricked at his psyche, that he almost wanted to get up and write in the missing ‘a’ himself. Perhaps, thought Draco, the ‘a’ had been deliberately excluded to do precisely that - to get under the skin of the viewer just as much as the painting itself was intended to do.

But the operative thing was that extra bit in the title, the ‘caught by his mates’ bit. Draco didn’t have to go away and look anything up to understand what was meant by that. A young guy, in what Draco assumed was a fairly masculinist culture (confirmed by Draco’s later researches) and caught doing something … not forbidden, but … unheard of, unbelieveable by mates to whom the titular skinhead obviously gave his respect and probably received as much in return. Mates with whom he probably had a bond which crossed, and maybe even superseded, filial lines. 

You could see it in what wasn’t shown in the painting. The boy’s reaction to the ‘mates’ who fell outside the view of the painting and existed only in the mind of the viewer, planted there by the intentions of the artist. Draco couldn’t exactly picture them, just the formless ‘shapes’ of their characters, but he knew exactly what the friend group must be like.

And to him it was all just as alien as the ‘skinhead’ and the artist were. 

He’d never had a group of mates like it, never really shared in that camaraderie of equality in the face of the world. No his friend group had consisted of a motley collection, none of whom he could really call a ‘mate’. He had those two hangers on, who laughed at his jokes and deferred to him because of his higher status, and frankly higher abilities. There was Blaise, who was so stiff and a real cold fish most of the time. And Pansy, who he was now sure, loved his position and name and money, far more than she did him. It was only Teddy Nott who could have been a true friend to him, but he was a quiet kid and never fought his way past all those who Draco had surrounded himself with.

So that just made Draco sort of sad, longing for what he’d never had. It saddened him even further to realise that the closest he’d ever come to a group of friends like it had occurred only recently with the orderlies that he’d had to work with at St Mungos. But even then he’d never fully belonged to their group, reminded as he was that he was an outsider forced into their company.

But that longing for mateship, still wasn’t what had drawn him back to the painting.

There was one thing about the painting that struck a profound chord with Draco, and it wasn’t something that he had to go away and research or that he knew of only vicariously. No he was intimately familiar with the aspect of the painting that had arrested him; intimately and personally.

It was the emotion, written large upon the boy’s face.

The artist had so perfectly captured that moment of, **‘busted!’** When you were caught out and you had to make a decision in that instant that would determine the course of your life from that point on.

He knew the possible thoughts that must be going through the young skinhead’s mind: should he dodge his mate’s questions or try to brave it out?

_“Just picked it up, didn’t I. Just seein’ what it was.”_

_“Oh, my mum made me, just had to pick them up for aunty Carol, didn’t I.”_

_“This hot girl just dropped them. If I catch her and give ‘em back, reckon I’m in there.”_

But the look on the boy’s face - that dumbfounded look of horror - by that, Draco knew the boy was only on the cusp of thinking about anything. He was still in that moment, that split second, when the adrenalin pumped into your bloodstream and you could think of nothing else but fight or flight.

Draco knew that emotion so well. For someone of his fairly limited years, he had experienced it far too often. Yes sometimes it had been due to circumstances of his own devising; he was beginning to be honest enough to finally admit it to himself. But in those few years of his life as a Death Eater under Voldemort, he’d experienced it time and time again. And worse, neither option was really open to him.

He remembered that first time that he’d returned from school for the Christmas holidays. Still so sure of himself. He’d been given a task, but he’d been shying away from pursuing it really seriously. In hindsight he knew why, he didn’t want to contemplate what it actually was that he’d agreed to do and further more, he didn’t really want to complete it either. But he’d tried to bluff up against the Dark Lord. 

He was soon taught the error of thinking he had any power in the face of Voldemort.

He remembered it all so clearly, arriving back at the Manor and being led into the presence of the Dark Lord. His presence dominating the room he’d selected as his audience chamber, even though he only seemed to be relaxing in the high backed chair that belonged to Draco’s father. Speaking of whom, his father, Lucius, was at his dark master's side. It was only later that Draco realised that he was sidelined, dispossessed in his own house due to his dark master’s displeasure. In that moment, when Draco’s mission had been asked after and he’d tried to bluff his way through it, he would never forget the way that reptilian face leaned forward to regard him. In a whisper, that seemed almost like a shout in that quiet room, he’d said, “Know you boy, that I can always tell when someone is lying.”

The horrified face of his father to the side confirmed it all and Draco knew that his own gaze, as it flicked back to the Dark Lord, had the same expression upon it as the boy’s in the painting. What was worse was that he had no options, he could exercise neither his desperate desire to flee, nor could he ever hope to match the power of that most terrible of dark wizards. And Voldemort knew it and laughed in the face of his abject terror.

He truly learnt that day why he had to call that man his master.

He wasn’t punished much, not by the standards of how Voldemort punished others who had defied and disappointed him. What had gotten to Draco, more than anything, were the thinly veiled threats against his parents; especially his mother.

What connected him even more to the painting was the fact that the two of them were so alien. There was nothing similar in anything of the worlds of either of them, except for experiencing this one emotion which connected them. This one thing reached across the chasm that divided them and made them the same in a single brief moment of time. It spoke to the human condition, Draco was beginning to realise, that everyone was connected by their emotional responses to the world; be they Muggle or wizard, Highborn or low. He was just a person like any other in that respect. And it had taken this painting of an extreme moment of emotional turmoil for him to make the connection.

So while the other two paintings had engendered far greater moments of realisation, it was this painting that Draco felt the strongest attachment to. This was the first painting that ever spoke to him. He had to mentally scoff at himself at that thought; up until a week ago, every painting that he’d ever seen, literally had the power to speak to him. So this painting, he had to amend his thought, was the first one to ever _figuratively_ speak to him.

He sat there lost in contemplation of the painting - mired in remembering those horrors of the past, longing for friendships he could never have - when a soft voice behind him said, “Draco?”

He shot to his feet, spinning around to face her whilst he did so. What ever else you said of him, he did have excellent reflexes, honed upon the Quidditch field.

Hermione had initially been taken aback by the suddenness of Draco’s movements, but that wasn’t what enforced her silence. What amazed her was the stero vision of Draco juxtaposed against the image of the boy in the painting behind him, both with exactly the same expressions upon their faces.

Draco, though, should have been thinking a-mile-a-minute. How could she be there, how could she have known he’d been there? Why her of all people? He must have known on some deep, subconscious level, that how he reacted now would decide the course of the rest of his life. Time should have slowed and presented him with options of how to respond, things he could say or do.

But it didn’t.

He was caught as dumfounded as the boy in the painting behind him.

He stood there as the moment dragged on, looking at the girl who had caused him more consternation than anyone else ever had, and all that he could think of was: 

fight or flight?

 

* * *

**  
The three paintings are all owned by the British People and housed in the Tate Gallery.**

**The first is 'Ophelia' by John Everet Millais.**

**The second is 'Triptych' by Francis Bacon (specifically Triptych - August 1972).**

**The third is 'A skinhead caught with a bunch of flowers by his mates' by Brendan McCarthy. Unlike the others it is not on permanent display, but was donated to the gallery by the artist and forms part of the Tate's collection. I have put it on display for the purposes of my story.**

**And lastly, Draco Malfoy is owned by a woman of such extraordinary generosity that she allows us to write stories like this one; as long as we acknowledge her ownership. Thank you JKR.**

****


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